Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA)

Heart of Los Angeles’s mission is to help young people overcome barriers through exceptional, integrated programs and personalized guidance in a trusted, nurturing environment. Heart of Los Angeles was founded in 1989 and now serves nearly over 3,000 youth, ages 6-24, and their families, through transformational expanded learning programming that includes academics, athletics, music, visual arts, and family services. All of Heart of L.A.’s core programming is designed to overcome barriers and nurture educational, career, artistic, and social success. For 35 years, Heart of L.A. has been serving the Westlake community in Central Los Angeles, and in 2022, began to deliver programming across South Central Los Angeles. In Central L.A., programs take place at Heart of L.A.’s Arts and Recreation Center (ARC), an award-winning building which opened in 2021 that integrates outdoor-indoor space and includes special features such as a recording lab, music pavilion, private rehearsal spaces, and an innovative maker arts lab. The ARC is supporting Heart of L.A.’s ability to grow and innovate its programs and serves as community hub from which its most robust integration of services are accessed and through which further expansion into other Los Angeles communities is incubated. Ninety-three percent (93%) of Heart of L.A.'s families have incomes that fall under the federal poverty limit and 96% are BIPOC.

Throughout its more than three decades of serving this community, HOLA’s overarching goal has remained the same: to become the most impactful community center it can be, ensuring that every student growing up in and around this neighborhood has equitable opportunities to succeed. HOLA has a vision for our city as a place in which every young person has the opportunity to realize their full potential. Unfortunately, far too many children have inequitable access to quality education due to challenges in the school or home–often both. HOLA’s program model is founded on safe environments, nurtured by a no-wrong-door approach, amplified by world-renowned partners, and strengthened by resilient and engaged students. HOLA knows that connecting youth to post-secondary success also means career access, greater opportunities, and uplifting the entire community.

Goal One: Help more young people and their families overcome barriers to success and provide equitable access to quality opportunities through continued partnerships so they can realize their full potential.

Goal Two: Advocate for the equitable and effective distribution of state and federal dollars to benefit our young people.

Goal Three: Invest in the service integration that makes HOLA programming exceptional and connect HOLA families to the resources they need to help their children succeed.

For the past several years, HOLA has been evolving into a more complex and sophisticated organization and is now providing much-needed educational and enrichment programming in key new service areas including South Central LA, Watts, and Koreatown. To help ensure that the organization is poised to meet our advocacy goals and responsibly expand the reach and scale of programs, HOLA has been investing in leadership development in a number of ways: 1) expanding the executive leadership team to include the key new positions of Deputy CEO, Chief Development Officer, Chief Programs Officer, and Chief Operating Officer; Senior Director of Arts and Senior Director of Community Engagement and Communications; 2) providing a variety of training opportunities in leadership competencies, antiracism and equity, and much more to HOLA’s leadership team, which includes all senior program staff; 3) providing leadership coaching through Watson Consulting Group to HOLA’s leadership team.

HOLA recently completed a 5-year Strategic Plan, informed in part by a Community Needs Assessment conducted in partnership with the University of Southern California’s LACI Program, which surveyed 495 HOLA parents and students. The plan lays out a process that takes the program model HOLA has built over 34 years and expands it geographically, systematically, financially, and conceptually. The plan’s impact-driven goals are already underway, with key initiatives enacting each of these priorities, including the delivery of programming across South Central Los Angeles and Watts. By following the principles and strategies identified in our Strategic Plan, we have grown from an organization serving roughly 2,000 youth annually from our Westlake campus, to providing programming to 3,000 youth across multiple locations. In every space, HOLA’s team is committed to seeking out and reaching those youth with the least access to resources; listening to, building trust with, and reflecting the needs of the community; and maintaining the rigorous and high-quality services that are central to HOLA’s approach. As HOLA increased its services to meet the needs of its community during the COVID-19 crisis, we became aware that our long-held dream of expanding our successful programming to other disadvantaged communities in the city was reaching a critical point, since the pandemic laid bare deep, systemic inequities that urgently needed to be addressed. We chose South Central Los Angeles as our first site for expansion because of its socioeconomic characteristics and because of the need for enrichment programing, particularly in the arts and scientific arts, since arts education creates a pipeline to the creative economy and because we firmly believe in the power of the arts to heal, uplift, connect, inspire, and transform. We especially wanted to offer services to more Black youth, who have historically been, and continue to be, deeply underserved in critical areas.